In the modern world, politics has ceased to be a realm of genuine decision making and has instead become a stage for representation. It is no longer the art of governance but a theater of images, signs, and narratives that feed upon themselves. Jean Baudrillard described this condition with his concept of the simulacrum, a system in which symbols no longer point to an underlying reality but exist only in relation to other symbols. In this sense, politics today is not the management of the common good but the perpetuation of an illusion, the illusion of action, the illusion of change, the illusion of leadership.
Who, then, is the politician in this world of mirrors? No longer a mediator between citizens and institutions, nor the architect of collective vision, the politician has become a manufactured presence, an entity whose existence is validated solely by its visibility. The role is not to govern, but to be perceived as a governor. Promises are not tools for transformation but rhetorical devices meant to sustain the news cycle. Crises are not obstacles to be overcome but theatrical backdrops against which authority is projected and reinforced.
Yet this transformation carries with it a grave consequence: the erosion of responsibility. If the politician is merely a simulacrum, if their function is purely performative, then their actions are severed from any notion of consequence. Decisions are transient, declarations weightless, commitments fluid. The very essence of governance, the burden of shaping a future, of being held accountable, dissolves into the fleeting immediacy of public spectacle.
Hans Jonas, with his principle of responsibility, warned of this perilous trajectory. Every political action, he argued, should be measured by its impact on the future, by its ability to preserve a world in which those who come after us can still live with dignity. But in a political system governed by image rather than substance, such responsibility is an afterthought—an inconvenience to the relentless machinery of appearances.
This creates a paradox: politics continues to exist as representation, yet it has lost its foundational function. The management of society has been displaced. shifted into the hands of economic forces, technological systems, and the invisible currents of market dynamics. Meanwhile, politics persists as a ritual, a necessary pageantry designed to maintain the illusion of collective agency, a comforting fiction that reassures the governed even as it strips them of any real power.
And yet, the crisis of responsibility is not confined to those who govern; it extends to those who observe. The more we accept this hollowed out politics, the more we become complicit in its perpetuation. If we resign ourselves to the spectacle, if we embrace the simulation as reality, then we, too, become mere spectators in a world where decisions are made elsewhere, beyond our reach.
Jonas challenges us to reclaim our role, not as passive witnesses to a political farce, but as agents of a renewed ethics of consequence. To acknowledge the illusion is not enough; we must demand a politics that once again dares to decide, to project, to shape the future. A politics that does not exist solely as image but is willing to act—knowing full well that every action carries a weight that cannot be erased by the shifting tides of public discourse.
Yet this demand is no easy task. The simulacrum is self-replicating, reinforcing itself at every turn, leaving little space for rupture. To break free from it requires an effort that extends beyond mere awareness: it demands a radical reimagination of what politics could be, a refusal to accept representation as a substitute for substance.
If there is a starting point, it must be the restoration of responsibility. To break the spell of spectacle, to see beyond the screen of signs and symbols, and to return to a politics grounded in consequence. Only then can we move beyond the spectral existence of contemporary governance and restore to politics its most fundamental purpose: to shape, to decide, to ensure that what we build today does not betray those who will inherit it tomorrow.
For in the end, politics is not meant to be a performance. It is meant to be a burden, a weight carried not for oneself, but for the generations to come.
